Ready Player None: Is YouTube Losing Its Gaming Community?

Right up there with challenge and reaction videos, Let’s Plays are the bread and butter of YouTube content, but is this framework due for change? TenEighty chats with Matt Collins, Hannah Rutherford, Ellen Rose, Arran TycerX, and Josh Temple about why some creators are jumping ship to Twitch and whether YouTube is doing enough to support their huge gamer base.

Headset. Fluorescent hair. A seemingly endless array of facial expressions. The caricature of a YouTube gamer is a familiar silhouette, finding a place on TV and in news articles as the world tries to wrap its head around the perplexing phenomenon of YouTube gaming content.

The community skyrocketed during YouTube’s early days as a platform, introducing gaming creators to the public as the world’s secret millionaires. In 2012, the amount of time people spent watching YouTube more than doubled over the year before, surpassing YouTube’s overall growth rate in the US.

The online gaming community has held on to their weighty YouTube presence, making up a total of around 14% of all video uploads last year (only second to People and Blogs). Statistics collected by Limelight Networks state that “young gamers (ages 18-25) worldwide spend an average of 3 hours and 25 minutes each week watching other people play video games online”. This time surpasses the 2 hours and 33 minutes the same audience spends watching traditional sports.

As a mainstay since YouTube’s early days, the community has seen a great deal of evolution. “I remember the days when gaming channels weren’t partnered directly with YouTube at all,” recalls Hannah Rutherford from Yogscast. “You were lucky to have 720p!”

“Back in the day, only vlogs that were three minutes or less stood a chance on the platform,” adds Ellen Rose, who cites the evolution of faster and more all-encompassing internet packages as critical pushes towards longer content. “I remember when YouTube started to open up certain accounts to videos of 15 minutes, that’s when the serialised Let’s Plays started popping up and playlists became really important.”

The shift in the algorithm from prioritising views to prioritising watch time was in favour of YouTube’s growing gamer base who, by virtue, were able to churn out longer videos at a higher frequency. This fueled full-game playthroughs with multiple-hour durations, allowing for what some may look back on as the golden age of YouTube gaming.

“ No longer can you upload a casual Let’s Play. You need to be bringing a professional level of quality to even get your foot in the door. ”

But it’s not just the platform that’s evolved, audience preferences have shifted to prioritising personality over prowess. “No longer can you upload a casual Let’s Play,” says Arran TycerX. “You need to be bringing a professional level of quality to even get your foot in the door.”

Like other mature areas of YouTube, the gaming community is so saturated with content that viewers have a unique power to not only choose which game they watch, but also select how that content is delivered to them, down to the very length of a video.

Josh ‘Slogoman’ Temple touches on the differences in how audiences consume content. From niche, highly engaged communities to sprawling ecosystems, he believes viewers are more likely to watch dozens of creators rather than a select few, a trend “reflected in YouTube’s decision to transition away from sub feeds and develop their discovery features”.

Alongside this, as Ellen points out, the gaming community relationship with game publishers has improved vastly.Initially many were hesitant to let their content be seen in full online, worrying that people would be more likely to watch than play themselves. “For a while there was a real fear that Let’s Play’s would disappear as full time creators couldn’t risk making stuff they couldn’t monetise.”

But now? “Gaming content is now one of the main ways of marketing for game publishers,” says Matt Collins, COO at NerdCubed. “As a result, most of the big gaming content is so incredibly commercialised.”

For years, YouTube held down the fort as the primary, top-of-mind outlet for gaming content, and for good reason. On practical terms, as Hannah points out, YouTube is a reasonably stable hosting site, which translates to a lower investment cost compared to hosting on your own. It’s also “4K capable, has great codecs, and is a great storage database for your content and for doing uploads of series,” she adds.

However, the grounding anchor of YouTube’s appeal is its massive audience, spanning from casual viewers to more dedicated fans with carefully cultivated subscription boxes. Like Kleenex is to tissue, YouTube is synonymous with online video — an invaluable amount of unspoken currency. If someone is looking for online video, YouTube is their first stop.

Arran notes that, for existing YouTube creators, building a live audience on top of existing content is almost an intuitive next step for those wanting to widen their scope of content. Whether you’re creating a new community of streaming viewers or another gaming channel entirely, YouTube creators who branch off of their main channel can build that audience with an existing base. Like starting a 100-meter-race at the 40-meter mark.

However, creators have not shied away from criticising the platform as well, and their complaints have been louder over the last year or so. Monetisation, while an issue across all YouTube communities, has presented unique problems within the gaming community. Ellen notes that many gaming creators have recently claimed that violent games are being flagged as unsuitable for advertisement, even when the adverts are for the very game they’re covering.

YouTube also has an incredibly unstable payscale, with a huge change to their ad structure that pulled placement of ads on any account with less than 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time. This not only alters an entire stream of income for larger creators, but cuts it entirely for smaller creators, a change TenEighty explored in depth with YouTube Partnership Program Changes: How Will Smaller YouTubers Survive?

“If a platform isn’t suited to provide a source of income itself, and struggles to support external avenues, then it becomes a concern.”

This type of change is integral to the platform itself, and Arran says that ensuring his source of income was secure became a priority after YouTube’s many let-downs. “Previously my concern as a creator was through viewer interaction and the experience for the end user,” he explains.

“However, with the changing conditions with YouTube AdRev, finding alternative/additional sources of income has become the primary worry. If a platform isn’t suited to provide a source of income itself, and struggles to support external avenues, then it becomes a concern.”

Additionally, a new beta rule was created requiring partners fill out a form for every video they upload. “This is such a ridiculous amount of paperwork and hoop jumping to ensure that we’re not putting problematic things into our videos,” says Hannah.

Creators also face problems communicating with their audiences. “It’s incredibly difficult to connect with your audience,” says Hannah. “Even when using the livestream chat area. The comment system in general, including moderation, is poorly designed and clunky.”

Communication with YouTube itself is also rocky, and creators faced with platform issues are left feeling undervalued. Despite gaming being such a huge cut of the overall community, it can sometimes feel like the platform is working against them on a feature-level. Because the site is not exclusively for gaming, “certain automated features (such as music checks) don’t allow any wiggle room for context,” says Hannah.

“YouTube likes to segregate gaming content and gaming content creators from its core creators,” says Matt. “As a result it very much feels the platform doesn’t really care very much about gaming content creators. Even when they launched ‘YouTube Gaming’, it very much felt like more of a way to separate gaming creators from everyone else, and the idea was done in such a minimal way that it didn’t help anything.”

This is a graph of watch time from traffic sources for the OfficialNerdCubed channel. The red drop-off is YouTube stopping recommending the videos anywhere, the green drop-off is them not showing them on the homepage. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ pic.twitter.com/gULOFwuNP9

Simply put, Josh says that YouTube misunderstands gamers as content creators. “For example, seeing all gamers as streamers under the YouTube gaming site,” he explains. “A lot of us, if not the majority, upload content instead of streaming.”

With all of these potholes that gamers are experiencing, it’s no surprise that other platforms are stepping up to service creators who feel neglected. Should a platform generate excitement during this time of mass frustration within the creator community on YouTube, they could prove to be a credible threat. Enter Twitch.

Created in 2011 as an offshoot of Justin.tv and acquired by tech giant Amazon in 2014, Twitch has skyrocketed to the forefront of live streaming platforms. They’ve established themselves primarily as hosts for video game and eSports streaming, taking off most noticeably with the battle royale genre. Figures from Streamlabs suggest that, throughout their most recent quarter, Twitch saw approximately 8,323,290 hours of Fortnite gameplay streamed across all platforms. With a parent company like Amazon, they have valuable perks like Twitch Prime memberships, granting benefits like free loot, ad-free viewing, and a free channel subscription every 30 days.

Twitch has also made moves to cater to communities outside of gaming. In 2015 they launched Twitch Creative, a specialised landing page for painting, illustrating, and music streams. The next year saw the ‘IRL’ content category, intended as a non-gaming-focused vlogging option with native mobile application for existing Twitch creators. And in early 2018, Twitch launched the game-changing Video Producer, “a set of tools that enables creators to bring the exciting community experiences Twitch is known for to produced videos.”

It’s no secret that Twitch and YouTube have been going head to head in the past couple years, but recently YouTube has been spending more time in Twitch’s shadow. In 2015, YouTube launched YouTube Gaming, a dedicated website positioned as a separate entity in which all gaming content would live. But it was followed with a lackluster response, with hosts complaining about the lack of ways to make money and asking for better tools for managing chat streams, which were easily descending into toxicity.

Most notably, YouTube Gaming was a deliberate attempt to silo gamers from the rest of the website, and the message of separation, whether intended or not, did not go over well. While a Streamlabs report states Twitch now boasts 1.13 million active streamers as of Q1’18, YouTube Gaming is said to have a mere 432,000. Reaching out to TenEighty, a Twitch representative cites the number of monthly active broadcasters at 2.2 million as of July 2018, a statistic that is also repeated on their website. No such number from YouTube Gaming is available for direct comparison.

YouTube has also taken to mimicking Twitch’s pay structure. In June 2018, they rolled out new alternative payment methods which is strikingly similar to Twitch’s basic subscription model. A new $4.99 channel membership will give subscribers exclusive content, subscriber badges, and special emojis. While this structure mirrors the exact cost and benefits of a Twitch subscription, YouTube will take only 30% of the channel membership revenue, giving the remaining 70% to creators — a more generous split than Twitch’s 50% cited by reports and streamer testimony, though this is not confirmed by the platform. This suggests the exact split may differ from streamer to streamer.

Despite YouTube’s efforts, Twitch is still experiencing an exponential growth that YouTube Gaming has yet to attain. Data from Streamlabs shows that the average number of people watching Twitch’s streams at any given moment increased to 953,000, up from 788,000. YouTube Gaming averaged 272,000 concurrent viewers, down from 308,000 in the previous quarter. Both figures YouTube has contested, but have not provided data of their own.

It’s this aspect, Twitch’s viewership growth at scale, that truly presents it as a threat to YouTube’s longevity in the gaming sphere. In a conversation about YouTube on the tech news podcast Vergecast, US filmmaker and vlogger Casey Neistat stated that Twitch as a platform alone, despite all of its beloved features, was not a threat.

“Except,” he clarified, “when you put the X factor of emotion, you put the X factor of culture, you put the X factor of cool in there, all of sudden becomes a very real existential threat. Not to YouTube as a viable search engine for video that is the global standard for searching for video,” he continued, “but the community, the community of creators and their audience, which is a huge extremely exciting, extremely valuable piece of property in the media space.”

The strength of Twitch’s community, he argued, is the most credible threat to YouTube’s presence.

However, Twitch is not all blue skies and sunshine. It’s important to remember that the platform is young and has yet to face the same level of scrutiny that YouTube has. Currently, Twitch is a relatively brand-safe platform. However, as they grow under their tech-giant parent, Amazon — a dynamic that may mimic that of YouTube and Google — it’s very possible that Twitch could encounter similar issues.

Brands will follow creators should a switch be made en-masse, and the very same issues regarding monetisation and platform/creator relationships could follow closely behind. YouTube has faced these problems for longer, and by the time that Twitch encounters problems of their own, YouTube could be leaps and bounds ahead of finding a solution. Alternatively, the publicity that YouTube has gotten following various mishaps is hard to ignore; if Twitch is doing their homework, they could be crossing bridges before they get there.

“We’ve already seen people lose their partnerships because YouTube changed the rules on them over requirements…what’s next?”

So what does YouTube need to do now in order to retain their existing creators?

For Hannah, communication is first and foremost the thing that YouTube systematically fails at, citing numerous issues from service outages to changing UI elements, all unannounced and unexplained. “At this point in the platform’s life, it has extended too far without correct infrastructure in place and the damage control needed is going to be too extreme,” she says.

“We’ve already seen people lose their partnerships because YouTube changed the rules on them over requirements. We’ve already seen gamers being false flagged for permitted in-game music. We’ve already seen simple and subtle steps taken to drive out musicians and animators – what’s next?”

The lack of creator engagement extends to Matt’s experience as well. “We’ve never really had any contact with anyone at YouTube, nor any help or assistance. While it’s some of the most popular content on the platform, YouTube clearly don’t think it’s commercially viable, and it doesn’t seem to fit into their current vision of selling themselves almost as a TV channel. That’s why I think they’re segregating gaming content to YouTube Gaming.”

Arran’s experience with YouTube’s support, however, is different, explaining that the YouTube Partner Program allows “lot of support directly from YouTube to better and improve my content”. But if the support team isn’t equally supporting all creators, that may be fueling claims of apathy on YouTube’s part towards their creators as a whole.

Josh agrees that communication could be improved on all fronts, between both platform and creator as well as creator and viewer. While the YouTube Gaming team is very active in maintaining their gamers, the gap between small and large creators continues to grow. “They need to figure out how to maintain the smaller influencers as well as the big ones, otherwise there won’t be any new trends and growth.”

I was at YouTube last week and asked them about issues with the algorithm and I shit you not, this is what they said:

"We don't really like the word 'algorithm'. We prefer you to use the word 'audience'"

In fact, this gap could be the most imminent threat for YouTube’s gaming community. YouTube and Twitch may always be chasing each other on feature-level comparisons, but if YouTube alienates small, up-and-coming creators, their lack of retention may be their downfall.

Audiences will go where they can find the best content, and thus will follow the best creators. The diminishing support for the grassroots gaming community could be a hard hit to YouTube’s reputation as the default online video platform, and combined with Twitch’s emphasis on community, it’s not hard to see why switching platforms would be tempting.

With such a high volume of complaints, it can be hard to feel like YouTube is doing anything to prevent this loss. Gaming is notoriously lucrative on YouTube, with much of its notorious ‘rich lists’ comprising several gaming creators. Do creators feel like the platform they’ve built a home on is doing all they can to maintain this community?

“A lot of of their moves are coming too little, too late,” says Matt. “Twitch is dominating live gaming content right now, and the only real reason to use YouTube instead is that they have a much better working video player.”

Ellen’s feelings are a bit more mixed. While she feels like YouTube is trying to support this huge base, they need to continue to support the creators that produce regular and enjoyable content that people watch. “Creators have become very, well, creative in finding new ways to approach gaming and I think it’s important to not have them boxed off too much,” she says.

With YouTube struggling and Twitch solidifying its presence in the gaming space, will creators be tempted to make the switch?

“Twitch is great for long form content and direct viewer interaction…YouTube is better for structured creative works. We very much focus on those two aspects on each platform.”

Several creators currently adopt a hybrid approach, balancing life on both platforms and being selective about which content lives where. With NerdCubed, Matt embraces and leverages the strengths of both platforms to create different styles of content. “Twitch is great for long form content and direct viewer interaction,” he says. “YouTube is better for structured creative works. We very much focus on those two aspects on each platform, which helps differentiate them.”

Hannah has a similar process, streaming four times per week, running a local capture for video and audio, and turning that same stream into more compact, tailored YouTube content. Despite streaming being a permanent part of her content format, streaming on YouTube is out of the question after continued algorithmic changes to favor longer form content.

“Having watched affected friends react to this news, it felt like a massive ‘eff you’ to animators and musicians since they produce content less quickly than others,” she says. “By the time we reached April 2017, I’d seen enough to know that I needed a backup plan and somewhere more enjoyable to do the majority of my work.”

The concept of putting a whole platform in between video-on-demand (VOD) and streaming may seem unnecessary, but for many creators, it’s a necessary tool for segmenting your audience based on content preferences and for giving creators the freedom to safely branch out beyond their standard content.

For Arran, breaking into the YouTube streaming game has been a challenge. While it allows him an opportunity to build on his existing audience, there’s a risk of negatively impacting his regular VOD content. “For my channel,” he explains, “VOD content is very different from the live content that I can provide, and hence I do see a drop in subscribers after live-streaming, seemingly because they’re bamboozled by the notification, or different content appearing which isn’t what they originally signed up for.”

Despite Twitch presenting itself as a viable option for those looking for a platform better suited for gamers, several creators are hesitant to make a full switch. For some, like Ellen and the Outside Xbox teams, YouTube is still the only platform in their foreseeable future. “[YouTube]’s where we’ve built an audience, and is where our home is,” she explains. “It’s really good for us.”

Streams are few and far between within their content style, and even then Ellen agrees that it makes more sense to upload a 90-minute VOD as opposed to a live experience; it’s a fun change of pace, but not a staple. “People get to see us without editing, including my extreme face of concentration when trying to beat bosses in Bayonetta 2,” she adds.

“Your core audience should always be kept in mind and you should adjust slowly to make sure that it’s the right thing to do for them.”

Likewise, Josh streams occasionally and purposefully, so moving platforms doesn’t quite make sense for him currently. “I do have my eye on other platforms but haven’t found anything right for my audience yet,” he says. Ultimately, he states, moving to new platforms can seriously affect a creator’s audience and channel, and should never be taken lightly. “Your core audience should always be kept in mind and you should adjust slowly to make sure that it’s the right thing to do for them.”

The reality is that a majority of the people involved in online content have built their homes on YouTube, and routine is hard to break for both creators and viewers. But when established routine is the only reason some creators have for staying, YouTube may need to make an extra effort to better tailor their environment for one of their largest and most lucrative segments before they disappear.

Josh suggests that being more proactive in responding to newer trends may help YouTube continue its reign, a change that could not only close the practical innovation gap behind Twitch, but also one that would remind creators that the site is actively working to better their experience. “Rather than push gaming creators onto other secondary sites they should consolidate their viewer base,” he explains.

It seems as though the most imperative changes YouTube needs are ones that not only improve upon the platform’s technical features, but also ones that show that the platform is actively creating a better, more tailored space for the community.

But despite spending time adopting the features that have made Twitch a viable competitor, perhaps the secret to YouTube’s longevity will be becoming less like Twitch and embracing the thriving VOD content that differentiates them.

“I do think that YouTube will always be primarily seen as a video hosting site, with streaming capabilities,” says Ellen. “Those are its roots and it’s hard to get people out of that mentality. But YouTube offers the opportunity to also help open it up to people who may not have played much, if anything, before. YouTube has that audience, where its competitors are more gaming focused and can seem daunting to non-gamers. So, embrace the gamers, and keep an extra arm out to let others join in on the hug.”

Updated 16 July 2018: Following publication, a representative from Twitch reached out to clarify the accuracy of some of the figures given regarding the platform’s streamer revenue and presence. TenEighty previously stated that Twitch orchestrated a firm 50% revenue split for creators which has now been changed to clarify the more accurate range of revenue splits that various creators may receive. Twitch has stated they do not share specifics on revenue. Additionally, updated information regarding Twitch’s monthly active streamer statistics was added in order to make sure the article accurately reflects the information we received.

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